Death, an Ultimate Trauma for Humanity: Heideggerian Philosophy of Demise in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych and Kafka's Metamorphosis

What death is and how to confront with death are the unsolved questions in human beings' mind from ancient times until now. Death is the confrontation with the reality and the beginning of the spiritual life, although many people think that death is the end of the being and they escape from it. In such situation, death becomes a traumatic issue for humanity because from the very beginning of the world what was the most important issue for human beings to struggle with was changing the reality of his mortality in this world. Heidegger is one of the influential harbingers in Existentialism, and the philosophy of death was flourished in his masterpiece, Time and Being, which is an authentic source for understanding the concept of death. In this research, the author tries to apply Heidegger’s view of death in two novellas, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, to demonstrate the fleetingness of the lives, the illusion of the world, and finally the reality of death which the protagonists of the selected works are trying to deal with them by themselves.